Leaking With A Vengeance

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When Novak's column naming Plame appeared July 14, the pundit asked whether the Administration had "deliberately ignored Wilson's advice" and repeated the Administration charge that Wilson's wife suggested her husband for the mission to Niger. Wilson, in a report that appeared on TIME's website three days after Novak's column, said his work with the CIA had nothing to do with his wife. "That's bull____. That is absolutely not the case. I met with between six and eight analysts and operators from CIA and elsewhere [before his February 2002 trip to Niger]. None of the people in that meeting did I know and they took the decision to send me." Wilson then added, "This is a smear job."

Character assassination isn't a felony, but revealing the name of a CIA officer is. It was the President's father, a former spy chief, who called it treason to leak the name of an undercover officer. And in this case, the officer was one who was working on the most vital security issue of all, the proliferation of WMD. At a time when good intelligence and successful spying has never been more essential to the nation's defense, the deliberate unmasking of a spy sent shudders through the secret web of spooks worldwide. When a U.S. operative is unmasked, foreign spy agencies go back, retrace his steps, review his contacts and try to figure out how the CIA operated in their country. "Anyone who was seen with her overseas is tainted now," warns a former officer who knew Plame. "If she went to the grocery store and talked to the grocer, people will say, 'I wonder if he was working for her?'"

In Plame's case, the damage may go even deeper. Plame was an NOC, meaning she did her job overseas under nonofficial cover and not out of an embassy or government office. Many in her family did not know she worked for the agency. Such unofficial covers are often with private companies to further disguise an operative's real work. Plame had worked with Brewster Jennings & Associates, an obscure energy firm that may have been a CIA front company. Deep covers take time, luck and work to develop; the outing of an NOC also blows the cover of the involved business or private entity.

Word that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the White House, State Department and Pentagon for leakers threw the West Wing into understandable confusion--not that it has been on its game lately. For most of last week, Administration officials felt their way carefully, hoping not to bump into anything sharp. Spokesman McClellan spent several days back on his heels trying to rejigger his original sweeping claims of innocence into more elastic arguments that left open the possibility that this was all a big misunderstanding.